In an IGN interview, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais said that “[they] want [SteamOS] to be at the point where at some point you can install it on any PC”. Below is a transcript of the interview. I tried to clean it up to my best ability.
Just like Steam Deck paved the way for Steam OS on a variety of third-party handhelds, we expect that Steam Machine will pave the way for Steam OS on a bunch of different machines in either similar form factors, different perf envelopes, different segments of the market, and get to a good outcome there. We definitely want to encourage people to try it out on their own hardware. We’ll be working on expanding hardware support for the drivers and the base operating system. Just last week, we fixed something that was preventing us from booting on the very latest AMD CPU platforms. Last month, we added support for the Intel Lunar Lake platforms. We’re constantly adding support and improving performance. We want it to be at the point where at some point you can install it on any PC, but there’s still a ton of work to do there.
If the embedded video doesn’t take you to the correct part of the video, the correct timestamp is 5:37.
EDIT: Here’s the written article of the video:
https://www.ign.com/articles/valves-next-gen-steam-machine-and-steam-controller-the-big-interview
A friend’s response to me yet again trying to push Linux on them, all unprovoked:
“Windows is getting increasingly shit. I’ve had a login problem for most of the year on my work machine where the cloud stuff won’t sync. I can’t even use Notepad now because it’s cloud-connected. I have to use Excel in the browser for similar reasons. I’d love to be able to move to Linux for everything, but I also cannot be fucked to maintain a Windows machine let alone a Linux one haha.”
This is exactly the kind of person SteamOS is going to capture, I think. The same way, Mint helped kill that whole “my operating system is my hobby” vibe.
I’ve not used SteamOS as a desktop. I own a Steam Deck, but I do think SteamOS is nearly there as an everyday user platform. It’s just a bit more aggressive with settings resets and data overwrites compared to something like Bazzite, which makes it not great for full desktop use yet. I’ve deep dove into nix this month and been making my own tools to bounce off the way NixOS works, like tests before switches and auto uploading to GitHub made a little webui control center etc. I could see Valve doing something similar with their OS to overcome current SteamOS’s issues and improve things for an end user
Why do you think Bazzite isn’t great for full desktop use?
You mis-read or I wrote it badly, I think Bazzite is awesome for everyday desktop (see my post history) Steamos isn’t as it stood when it was an unofficial release as it was purely designed for the deck so it would do things like overwrite settings when it updated. Bazzite was the steamOS for normal everyday desktop and non-deck builds for me.
it’s fine for average users but if you really want to use it for something other than browsing or gaming you really have to use it with Distrobox. And that’s fine, bit of extra work to set up but honestly if you’re going to use something that is beyond web browsing, streaming, and gaming you’re probably going to go with a different distro anyways.
Distrobox isn’t really an option I went with for day to day, I’d use it to keep my projects and dependencies under control. Flatpak was fine, app image was fine, I actually spun up my own template after a bit https://github.com/Sirico/bazzite-dev. Beyond adding a couple of programs and theming, I couldn’t see why I’d need to be in the files silverblue/ublue lock off.
I’m now on nix because I have a lot of stuff to do at work that I was playing about with bluefin for, but nix has more support etc. Knowing that hitting the power button will get me to the desktop every morning bar a hardware issue is for me the biggest win. Making something I can just update throughout a whole fleet and doing it all within GitHub or code is a game changer. So for me immutable are no different to convent distros great for basic stuff like you said browsing etc and good for the high-end stuff it’s this middle ground where people have to learn a new way of doing something it feels like it falls apart I think.
I feel like I see this comment every time immutable distros are mentioned (of course Bazzite most of all).
Sorry but you’re wrong.
please, tell me why I’m wrong. I’m not a fan of immutable distros as I feel they’re limiting but I’d love to be convinced otherwise.